Hitachi intros Simple Modular storage system

Hitachi sure seems to be big on storage today, with the company now following up its 4TB disk announcement with its new "low-cost" Simple Modular Storage Model 100 aimed at small and medium-sized businesses. Promising enterprise-class capabilities with "consumer levels of simplicity," this one boasts a wizard-based GUI setup that Hitachi says will get things fully operational "in minutes," along with a range of backup measures and features to ensure "non-stop data availability." Most importantly, the system will also give you plenty of space, with it able to be scaled from under 1 terabyte to nearly 9 terabytes. All that, of course, comes at a price, with the system starting at just under $5,000.

[scott @ Oct 15th 2007 12:51PM]

Um... I can buy ten 1TB drives from newegg, get a rack mount raid plus rack and it will still cost less than 5 grand. It wouldn't even be too hard to get working.

Easy should not mean expensive Hitachi.

[John Laur @ Oct 15th 2007 4:00PM]

This is not the same thing. Your "Rackmount RAID" will probably have redundant power supplies at best and give you a dumb SCSI or SAS interface to the array. This unit has redundant storage processors and redundant IO paths and in addition supports various provisioning methods internally.

Can you still build one yourself? Sure, with a couple of high end (dual Gig-E NIC, fast scsi controlelr) Linux boxes to frontend the thing and act as redundant storage processors you could get there. You also need an extremely intimate knowledge of Linux HA, LVM, iSCSI enterprise target, samba, NFS, etc. and all the time to write software to manage the beast! You might squeeze it in under $5K not considering time, so have fun with that. You would be able to scale it cheaper though I guess.

[John Laur @ Oct 15th 2007 12:56PM]

There are a lot of new boxes entering this "low end SAN / high end NAS" space. EMC has been doing the AX-150 and NetApp has been doing the StoreVault. It's good to see Hitachi getting into the game too and also nice to see that they are including the most important feature, dual controllers, into this product.

The NetApp StoreVault is not offered with dual controllers, but it is currently vastly more capable and solid compared to EMC's AX-150, which aside from having increased redundancy is a complete heap of crap and waste of space. I feel qualified to say this as I own and use both units and am really not 100% happy with either of them. It's very obvious to me that neither company understands the real needs of the market they are targeting. Hopefully Hitachi will not be so dumb.

[theklenkster @ Oct 15th 2007 2:36PM]

the real question is what the transfer speeds are.
and that's a matter of how lightweight the protocol is to the clients. that's what separates a NAS or a home brew linux raid box from higher end storage.

[KazO @ Oct 15th 2007 4:23PM]

I hope this thing does RAID in HW, unlike the StoreVault. I'd like to think that 'dual controllers'= hardware but you never know. One oddity is that it seems if a drive fails, you don't remove the bad one; you put a replacement in a 'repair slot;' fill those (two) up and you send it back. Does that also mean if you buy a 6-drive model, you can't field-upgrade it to 12?

There's definitely a market for

[Scooter @ Oct 15th 2007 6:44PM]

some of this tech is interesting, but is Engadget going to continue trawling industrial and corporate tech for our edification? If so, throw in some training wheels guys, cos we're going to need some guidance on the details.

[aquamike7 @ Oct 16th 2007 1:20PM]

KazO - you can't do any field upgrades to this box- it's completely closed, hence the low cost. If a drive fails, you can use one of the two "repair" slots, but you need to send the unit back to hitachi to replace any of the internal drives. Quite an interesting model....